Grandmaster Flash might easily have missed the hip-hop revolution. Born in Barbados and transplanted to the South Bronx as a child, he began his adolescence far from the city, in a group home for foster children in rural upstate New York. By the time he returned to the borough’s Fort Apache section in 1971, things were changing fast. Music was getting more percussive; teenagers with spray cans were scrawling hieroglyphic names and full-fledged murals on subway cars.

He was Joseph Saddler then, a nerdy high school student who liked to take appliances apart to see how they worked. In a few short years, though, in the hardest-hit part of a hard-hit city, he helped to invent what many would agree was the most sweeping cultural movement of the last 40 years, and then he barely hung on to see it bloom.

The four-decade roller-coaster ride of Grandmaster Flash, now 58, is a tale as improbable and as distinctly New York as that of hip-hop itself, filled with raw creativity, fame, drugs, broken friendships, lawsuits and, finally, something like smooth sailing. In parallel with the city that produced it, hip-hop emerged in the mid-1970s as a symbol of urban decay and evolved into a gilded spectacle of consumption. Mr. Saddler, the music’s first virtuoso, rode its initial wave, got crushed by the second and rebounded as one of the few from his generation whose careers are still going strong.

On a recent day in Harlem, he spread a wrinkled sheet of paper on the table of a Mexican takeout place as if opening his notes for a lecture. His features have filled out from the angular profile he had as a teenager, but he still looked athletic and lithe. He had just returned from England, where he had D.J.ed for 10,000 people. He was wearing a bright red baseball cap with the letters GF and a T-shirt that said Grandmaster, not exactly incognito.

These are good times for Grandmaster Flash. After a long fall, during which he was addicted to cocaine, estranged from some of his six children and sleeping on his sister’s couch, he has homes in the city, on Long Island and in Atlanta, but spends most of the year on the road, D.J.ing (you can’t call it spinning records) in the United States and abroad. For the past 15 months, he served as an associate producer on the director Baz Luhrmann’s “The Get Down,” a new Netflix series that features an actor playing Mr. Saddler as a teenager.

The series, set in hip-hop’s gestational period, has brought him back to the streets and parks where he started, now a middle-aged man straddling two eras connected by a sound that people said would never last.

He declined to talk about the bad times or his early record company, Sugar Hill, or the rappers he worked with, the Furious Five, two of whom have called Flash the Milli Vanilli of hip-hop. He sneered at a nearby restaurant called Sugar Hill Cafe, saying the name made him sick.

“Life has been good,” he said. “Even during the times that were really tough, I’m really O.K. People poke holes in me. Some people are mad at me, most people love me. It’s O.K. Nobody’s perfect.”

These days, he said, he enjoys being a father, and lying low when he is back in town. The world is finally catching up to him. “You gotta realize that this thing here, this is the youngest of all the cultures, hip-hop,” he said. “Rock’s been around forever. Pop’s been around forever. This is the youngest, so it’s the least understood. But it is the biggest. The biggest monster.”

JOSEPH SADDLER WAS BORN on the first day of 1958 in Bridgetown, Barbados, the only boy in a family of four girls. His father, who left the family when Joseph was 7, was a record collector and a transit worker who liked to drink and who used his boxer’s hands against his wife and children. Joseph’s mother was a seamstress who spent much of his childhood in and out of psychiatric care.

Joseph and his younger sister entered foster care when he was 8, shuttling first among foster homes in the Bronx, then spending five years at the Greer School near Poughkeepsie. There, he got his first chance to D.J. at a school dance, playing Bobby Byrd’s “I Know You Got Soul” for an interracial crowd.

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Grandmaster Flash at the Basil Behagen Playground in the Bronx.CreditNicole Bengiveno for The New York Times

There are almost as many versions of hip-hop’s origin story as there are people who tell it, but most begin the musical portion — graffiti came earlier — with three Bronx D.J.s who began throwing parties in parks or community centers. Clive Campbell, a slightly older Jamaican from Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx who called himself DJ Kool Herc, drew crowds by mashing together instrumental breaks on records, spurring dancers to perform the acrobatic moves that came to be called break dancing or b-boying. In Soundview, Afrika Bambaataa, a former member of the Black Spades gang, played at the Bronx River Community Center. Flash was the third.

“I say the Bronx created it,” he said. “We all played a part. Herc was first, the founder. Then Bam had the most selections. And I just came up with a way to deliver the music, technically speaking. So the three of us together sort of figured it out.”

Their launching pad was a city in shambles, nowhere more so than the Bronx. In 1975, police officers and members of other public safety unions, responding to calls for layoffs, created a pamphlet, Welcome to Fear City, that warned: “Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can.” President Jimmy Carter toured a blighted stretch of Charlotte Street in the South Bronx in 1977, as helicopters buzzed overhead to assure his safety. Amid the decline, Flash had a child and a job delivering garment patterns, making ends meet by spinning records at parties in parks and school gyms.

AT THE MEXICAN RESTAURANT, Flash walked patiently through what he called the Quik Mix Theory, the turntable breakthrough that started it all: 4bf = 6rc = loop. Four bars forward equaled six rotations counterclockwise equaled a loop. He could start a beat on one turntable, let it play for four bars, then switch to another copy of the same record on a second turntable. As the second record played, he would rotate the first record counterclockwise for six revolutions, putting the needle back at the start of the beat, ready to go when the record on the second turntable finished its four bars.

It took him nearly three years to perfect the formula, he said, but when he did, people thought it was magic. To him, it was more like the map of the human genome.

Voices could now rhyme over the beat without being interrupted by a record’s verses and choruses. “This was the birth of rap,” he said, only partly overstating the case. “So this Quik Mix Theory caused the whole culture. It’s scary to think about sometimes. But that’s what it did.”

But first someone had to rap. Flash tried emulating the patter of disco D.J.s, who talked while they spun, but he was too busy with the turntables, so he left a microphone for people from the crowd to talk. “Many people failed,” he said. A local resident named Robert Keith Wiggins, calling himself Cowboy, started spitting call-and-response rhymes to Flash’s beats, exhorting crowds to say “ho” or to “throw your hands in the air and wave ’em like you just don’t care” — lines that would become hip-hop staples for decades to come.

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Grandmaster Flash in his kitchen circa 1982 during the filming of “Wild Style”.CreditCharlie Ahearn

“Flash was so far advanced beyond everybody else,” said Carlos Mandes, 57, a D.J. who called himself Charlie Chase to signal that he was chasing Grandmaster Flash for supremacy of the Bronx. “He was fast, he was precise. He was an inspiration.”

Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie caught Flash at a party in the late 1970s at the Webster Avenue Police Athletic League and were knocked out.

“Flash had megaskills,” Mr. Stein said. “He did a lot of show-offy stuff, scratching with his elbows and behind his back. His timing was always precise. The whole thing was furious energy the whole time. It was eye-opening.” When Mr. Stein later raved about the music to people in the business, he said, “I’d say 100 percent said it was a fad and that it would go away.”

Gangs ran the Bronx in those years: Savage Skulls, Black Pearls, Black Spades, Seven Immortals, Savage Nomads, Roman Kings, Ghetto Brothers, Persuaders. A group of former Black Spades known as the Casanova Crew provided security at Flash’s parties; they were as rough as anyone who might cause trouble.

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The Furious Five on an album cover.

For Mr. Saddler, the pieces fell into place quickly. He became Flash, from his short-lived graffiti tag, FLASH 163, and Grandmaster — like a martial arts expert — for the way he cut up beats. More M.C.s joined, until they had become the Furious Five: Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Scorpio and, the last to arrive, Rahiem. The parties got bigger and wilder.

“It was the most amazing spectacle of my adolescent life at that time,” said Guy Todd Williams, 53, a.k.a. Rahiem, who saw the group in 1978 and joined the next year. “They were entertainers. You didn’t just come to hear them, you came to see them as well. What he was doing musically on the turntables was unprecedented at the time.” At one party, Mr. Williams said, Cowboy started teasing a friend who had enlisted in the military, mocking the march cadence, “hip, hop, hip, hop.”

“That’s where the term derived from,” Mr. Williams said.

FOR A CITY IN DISTRESS, hip-hop was an embodiment of disorder and a creative response to it. Even the performers did not see much future in the music beyond their local parks and rec centers, or the mix tapes they sold to peers. There were no instruments and no singing, and the musical accompaniment came from others’ recordings — how could anyone make records out of that? The few entrepreneurs who started signing rap groups to record contracts were as unconstrained as those making the music.

“It’s ghoulish the way they sucked money out of these kids,” said Steven Ames Brown, a lawyer who sued and won royalty settlements from Sugar Hill Records and its owners on behalf of the Furious Five and other groups. “No one got paid anything until we started suing everybody.”

For Grandmaster Flash, barely out of his teens, the parties where he performed meant status, women and enough money to start a cocaine habit, which grew along with his paychecks.

“We all began to dabble with cocaine,” Mr. Williams said. The money also led to arguments among group members, who complained that Flash was being paid more for shows than they were, and briefly parted with him to work with Mr. Mandes instead. (Two group members, Melle Mel and Scorpio, declined to be interviewed for this article because of their differences with Flash.)

The fights escalated with their first recordings, in 1979, which were credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, even though studio musicians replaced Flash’s turntable work on all but one song. Now people who never went to a Flash party, who knew only the recordings, were becoming the group’s fan base — so why was Flash getting top billing and building his name? The group’s biggest hit, the landmark socially conscious rap “The Message,” featured only one of the Furious Five, Melle Mel; most of the group hated it.

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Members of the Furious Five onstage in 1982.CreditJanette Beckman

The bottom also came quickly for Flash. By November 1983, not four years into his recording career, he had split with the group and was strung out and broke, selling his possessions for pennies on the dollar and making mix tapes for drug dealers in exchange for drugs. Once, in a dingy basement on 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, where he had gone to freebase cocaine, he heard the latest record by his old M.C Melle Mel, “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” He smoked away the next two years before landing in a coma in St. Barnabas Hospital, weighing just 118 pounds. It took a decade, and the death of Cowboy, wasted by drugs or illness, to climb back into the light.

“At 23, I was flexed,” Flash told David Ritz, who wrote Flash’s autobiography. “At 28, I was taking the train.”

NEW YORK IS A CITY of reversals and redemption. The smoldering South Bronx wasteland depicted in “The Get Down” now teems with new construction. The number of homicides in the 41st Precinct, the one known as Fort Apache and still one of the city’s poorest areas, fell to three last year, from 44 in 1990, Police Department statistics show; robberies fell to 226, from more than 1,000. Five people were killed there in the first seven months of this year.

In 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the induction, Jay Z put Flash in historical perspective, saying, “What Les Paul and Chuck Berry did for the electric guitar, Flash did for the turntables.”

Hip-hop, whose evolution rendered the group obsolete, evolved again, opening a path for Flash not as a young revolutionary but as a keeper of the old tradition. In music’s least nostalgic genre, there is now a place for oldies and legends. “Last week in England I decided to go ’70s the whole night, and I couldn’t leave the stage,” he said. “So I’m just really sure this ’70s music is something people want to hear today.”

If so, “The Get Down” — the first six episodes were released this month — aims directly at that hunger. Funk beats ooze from the soundtrack; long scenes dissect the Quik Mix Theory; bullets fly across barren streetscapes. For Flash, the series has functioned as a homecoming of sorts, even if you can never return to adolescence.

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On the set of the Netflix series “The Get Down.”CreditNetflix

“It’s sad how people paint the Bronx like it was some kind of O.K. Corral,” he said. “I think it was a city of experimentation. We left no stone unturned musically. Life was a lot simpler then. I didn’t see a whole lot of problems in that period. Maybe it was because I knew how to handle the corral. But I do know that when I came out in the park, all the gangsters, all the gang members and everybody would come to the park in total, total peace. The biggest gangs would buy soda, chips and popcorn for like 500 people. You’d see guys with a reputation for being super-ruthless, but they were the kindest guys to my audience. The police officer would be right across the street drinking a soda, because anybody that could be starting trouble was right in the park with me. So they allowed us to play until 11 or 12 o’clock.”

With “The Get Down,” he said, he hopes to convey that dimension of hip-hop’s formative period. “I think it’s a great time,” he said. “I’m excited for people to take a look. I ain’t trying to change anybody. I just say, Here’s what it was.” Four decades after its inception, he said, hip-hop is now “a billion-dollar business.”

“Somebody has to say, where did this thing come from?” he said. “Who baked this cake? Why not ask the baker?”

His silence on aspects of the past aside, he said he was not bitter about the money he never earned from his hit records or concerts, or the wealth earned by the stars who followed him.

“I’m so glad I didn’t come in at this time,” he said. “I didn’t mind spending the 10, 12 years building a solid foundation of what I do, and have people follow me, so that when I got into the lions’ den, which is the industry, I didn’t get eaten up. So it’s a good thing now.”

He gestured out the window to the new buildings rising on 145th Street. Most of his peers now perform sporadically, if at all. Some, like Cowboy, are gone. If Flash no longer rules the Bronx, he enjoys a different, broader kind of success.

“I accept change,” he said. “Forty years ago that might have been a grocery store. Today it’s a Caribbean market. If you don’t accept change, change will leave you behind. So I’m good with change. Oh, yeah.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Grandmaster Flash Beats Back Time. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe